Movies included in this post:
- Chak De India
- One Two Three
- Race
- Sunday
- Mithya
- Dus Kahaniyaan
Give the post some time to load, as the movies are split in to many files.
Hindi Movies Online – 5
Site outage: How to handle?
I recently shifted out of my IIS setup in to a LAMP account. The site’s up time was much better, until yesterday, when suddenly my site was sucked in to the Internet black hole. Repeated help-desk queries pointed me to a routing issue in their end. Finally it got resolved after nearly 7 hours. If you were disappointed (dream on!) to find my site down, I apologize; My site is up again and hopefully will remain so for sometime to come.Due to my site downtime, I got to do other (positive) things.
- Computer offtime: I didn’t get to check my email (my site’s) for the entire black out. I found it actually refreshing! Believe me, it suddenly makes you feel you have more hours per day than usual.
- Got to read some books:
- I got to read the 4 Tamil magazines I bought one month back. No, I am not kidding. I hadn’t even touched those magazines since I bought them last month. I was able to catch up with whats hot (or warm, or cold!) in Gollywood (Tamil film industry) finally.
- Read couple of chapters from the excellent Advanced Windows Debugging (Addison Wesley). Nothing can beat the smell of paper and the feeling of the book in your hand! Kindle won’t be there in my wishlist ever, I guess.
- Sleep: I wouldn’t have believed how refreshing a 3 hours nap could be, if I hadn’t experienced it personally. I woke up fully charged, but soon felt deflated when I found out the site was not up yet. Damn, this site is too much interwoven with my day-to-day activities, more than I’d admit actually.
- TV: Watched Roadies 5.0. Interesting reality show. I wanted Ankita to come in again, but she lost…Hmm, Shambavi being there is also good in a way, as her absence could have reduced the masala in the show.
- Movies: I watched Fargo. I am a big fan of Coen brothers; I am collecting their films, still 5 more to go
Now that the site is up, I am back to my usual blogging self, but I’d surely miss all those other things that I like to do. Computers **do** eat up your time like anything.
Bottomline: Stay away from blogging (and computers) at least a day every week. Enjoy the other good things in life! And, come back to blogging with full josh
Link to this post!
21 Virus and other Malware payload videos
When I was uploading my Cascade virus video yesterday, I found a lot of interesting videos on the same topic. I enjoyed them thoroughly. I am listing the ones that I found interesting here to make things easy for others to find these videos easily. Hope you like this list too.
Do let me know if you come across any such videos online, I am a big sucker for these
Following "In Action" videos were all uploaded by onNeutral. Professionally done. excellent stuff! I haven’t included any info on the worms/virii he talks about, as he has added more than enough info in the videos (read the red ticker bar to the bottom in all these videos)
1) In Action: Blaster Worm
See the Blaster worm attack another computer and how both of them attack a simulated http://windowsupdate.com server.
2) In Action: Melissa Worm
Continue reading “21 Virus and other Malware payload videos” »
Cascade Virus: Down the memory lane.
I have always been fascinated with computer virii. My first exposure to computer virii was back in 1994, when my 360KB floppy disk got infected by STONED. The hype around virii was so much and I was so misinformed, I kept that infected disk in the jacket, away from all other diskettes I owned for 2 weeks!! No, I am not kidding.
Gokul, (owner of Port Bit Systems/Trichy, who was my first computer teacher) looked like a hero to me, when he could magically clean the infection by running a command line DOS McAfee. Man,those days were cool! Later when I started learning x86 assembly and DOS internals, I got fully absorbed in to the wonder world of DOS virii. (I still have the first DOS anti-virus program I wrote – “(C) Brain” remover – somewhere in my old HDD). “Computer Viruses: Prevention, detection and cure” by Rajneesh Kapur was my first viruses book; An excellent one! This is out of print now, can’t even find it in the original publishers site.
One virus I fondly remember to this day, is the famous (!?) CASCADE virus (a.k.a Raindrop/17xx). This virus was a non-overwriting, resident COM infector. When triggered it made the characters in the screen fall in to a nice heap at the bottom. (Remember, we were in the command line mode then!). It was kind of cool to see this cascading action.
Cascade was the first virus to use encryption. The virus consisted of two parts – the virus body and an encryption routine. The latter encrypted the body of the virus so that it appeared different in every infected file. After loading the file, control was transferred to the decryption routine which decoded the virus body and transferred control to it. Unlike future polymorphic viruses, Cascade encoded only the body of the virus. The size of the infected file was used as the decryption key. Since the decryption routine remained unchanged, antivirus programs detected the virus with ease.
If you have never seen the virus in action, look at the screen shots below:
English Movies – 3
You can watch the following movies below:
- Pistol Whipped
- Funny Games
- The nines
- The Contractor
- Taxi (2004)
Enjoy.
HowTo: Fix "The response to the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method received from the weblog server was invalid"
Today I got this error message from WLW: “The response to the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method received from the weblog server was invalid“. Why did WLW think the response was “invalid“?? What exactly did it receive from WordPress??
Luckily, WLW logs a lot more in the background. You can access that log file via Help -> About WLW. Click on the “Show Log Results” link in the dialog box. This will open the log folder.
Mine had this trace dump:
WindowsLiveWriter,21504,Fail,00020,18-Mar-2008 14:00:01.479,"WindowsLive.Writer.Extensibility.BlogClient.BlogClientInvalidServerResponseException: Invalid Server Response - The response to the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method received from the weblog server was invalid:
Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.XmlRpcBlogClient.CallMethod(String methodName, XmlRpcValue[] parameters)
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.MetaweblogClient.DoBeforePublishUploadWork(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.WeblogBlogFileUploader.DoUploadWorkBeforePublish(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostReferenceFixer.FileUploadWorker.DoUploadWork(BlogFileUploader fileUploader)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostReferenceFixer.LocalFileTransformer.Transform(String reference)
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.LocalFileReferenceFixupFilter.FixReferences(String reference)
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.OnBeginTag(BeginTag tag)
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.LightWeightHTMLDocumentIterator.Parse()
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.FixLocalFileReferences(String html, ReferenceFixer fixer)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.LocalSupportingFileUploader.UploadFilesBeforePublish()
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.DoWork()
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.AsyncOperation.InternalStart()"," at System.Environment.GetStackTrace(Exception e, Boolean needFileInfo)
at System.Environment.get_StackTrace()
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.Diagnostics.LogFileTraceListener.Fail(String message)
at System.Diagnostics.TraceInternal.Fail(String message)
at System.Diagnostics.Trace.Fail(String message)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostEditingManager.UpdateWeblog(Boolean publish)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostEditingManager.PostToWeblog(Boolean publish)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.PostEditorMainControl.commandPostAndPublish_Execute(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.ApplicationFramework.Command.RaiseEvent(Object eventKey, EventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.ApplicationFramework.Command.OnExecute(EventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.ApplicationFramework.CommandBarButtonLightweightControl.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.Controls.LightweightControl.RaiseMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
at WindowsLive.Writer.Controls.LightweightControlContainerControl.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
Pretty neat stack trace,eh? 
It clearly shows that DoUploadWork() (Invoked by UpdateWebLog()) method fails for some reason. Armed with this knowledge, I took a look at my post. I had many pictures in that and my WLW was setup to upload pictures through XML RPC. So, obviously that was causing some kind of trouble. I traced down the big picture (size: ~0.7MB) in my post, resized it to 40K and published again. Voila, things worked perfectly!
I googled for the error message, since I wanted to know how other people solved this. Looks like increasing the memory size for PHP in the server side will also help. So, one of the following things should help you to solve this problem:
- If you have images embedded that need to be uploaded to the server, make sure they are not big. I don’t have any idea on the *optimal* size. I guess anything less than 100K should be ok.
- If still you are getting the same error, try increasing the memory_limit value in php.ini to 12M or 16M. Check this page for info on memory_limit. If you don’t have access to your server, you may have to talk with your host provider.
I believe the first solution will fix this error, in most of the cases. Do let me know in the comments, if you come across any other solutions.
Link to this post!
Hindi Movies Online – 4
For this edition, I have the following 5 movies:
- Black and White
- Kabhi Haan, Kabhi Naa
- Jaaneman
- Black Friday
- Amar Akbar Anthony
I was surprised to find Black and White online, so soon! Anyway, good for us, eh?! Hope this provides a good mix of new (2008 film – Black and White) and old (1977 – Amar Akbar Anthony) films. Enjoy!
Student life: Odd exam superstitions
One of my school friends had this habit of wearing the same shirt everyday for all the days of an exam – be it the quarterly or the annual, we were sure he’d wear the same yellow full sleeves day after day. The shirt was too worn out, totally faded (I came to know it was actually an yellow shirt, only when he told me!), in fact I remember seeing couple of patches in the arm pit area, but all these didn’t stop him from trusting his old shirt. Nay sir, never ever did he come with out his good old "yellow" shirt!
This made me think why I had no such beliefs or "superstitions" myself….may be if I had something my grades wouldn’t be this abysmal. Anyway, all the shirts I used to wear to college were kind of worn out already – things other than clothes were of interest to me then (no..no..what you are thinking is wrong!) – so I guess I had this same-object luck all the time
Thinking about it, I now realize that nearly all my friends had at least one exam-superstition. One of my 9th standard friends didn’t cut his hair during the annual exam, while another friend didn’t take bath through out the exams This was kind of awkward for all of us as he used to sweat a lot!! I am used to skipping bath too, during exams, but that was purely because I thought I could use that 15 minutes for reading couple of more pages – I used to open the text book only the day before the exam, you see, so I needed all the time that I could get for at least passing the exam. Maths and Chemistry were the prime candidates for me, to skip bath, during my school/UG days.
During the exams, I have noticed God becoming an important entity in all students’ lives. My mom used to shout at me, to see the God before going to the exams, but most of the times her sound advice didn’t penetrate my numb skull as my mind was full of some formulae or some text which I absorbed (read, "mugged up!") in the last minute! My level of talking usually went down during exams – Aha…may be this was my exam-superstition, if you can call it one – "to talk less", as I was afraid if I talked about other things, I would lose the thread of what I learnt for the next exam.
Superstitions used to vary a lot; From "I will eat only 2 idlies in the morning of the exam" to "I will come only by the 8.30 bus" to "I will make use of only this hero pen for all the exams" to "I will wear the same slipper/dress everyday"; there were too many to count here. Luckily, my friends’ circle was made of so many varied characters, I had a nice exposure to this wonderful world of exam superstitions. There were couple of weird habits too – "bringing a peacock feather and keeping it out near the paper during the exam" beats it all! One of my 8th standard friend used to do this. "Tying a knot in the corner of the hand-kerchief at the start of the exam and untying it only after the exam" was an intriguing one too.
I am pretty sure these habits die hard. Only a small percentage of people who used to have these beliefs during their school days grow out of them. These habits are carried forward in to the corporate world too….wait…is this probably why my colleague was stinking so much that day during his presentation?? may be, may be not!
Link to this post!
English Movies Online – 2
For this edition, I have the following movies:
- Chaos (2005/II)
- The Grudge 2
- American Hustle
- RISE: Blood Hunter
- The Messengers
Do let me know in the comments, if you have any new links. TIA.
Virus group 29A disbanded – who’s next?
Couple of weeks back, 29A officially shut down business. 29A’s published work was one of the best (IMHO) sources for cutting edge virus technologies. Their e-zines provided a sampling of what was happening in the Virus underground during that period.
This was the last message posted by VirusBuster in their site:
I tried to contact ValleZ for some time in order to take a decision together about the future of 29A with no luck therefore I decided to take the decision alone. And my decision is that 29A goes officially retired. I feel this is fair because I am kinda the alpha and the omega of the group. 29A was born in Dark Node, my BBS, and I am the last active member of the group. My last words as 29A member are for all the people that worked hard to make of this group the best one: Thank you very much! Regards, VirusBuster/29A
29A has left the building!
Kind of sad.
I came to know of 29A when I was in my 2nd year UG, around 1997. 29A was a new group then (If I am right, the group formed only in the mid of 1996). BTW, if you are wondering why they named it so, 29A is the hex representation of 666 decimal.
Continue reading “Virus group 29A disbanded – who’s next?” »
